What Went Wrong: Offshoring

An advanced degree and experience in the tech sector should be a ticket to a job in today's economy. But older workers in the heart of the new economy, Silicon Valley, are finding their resume is not the issue. Aaron Glantz reports in The Bay Citizen.

The reconstruction of the San Francisco Bay Bridge is well timed to create much-needed jobs. And it has. Only the jobs are in China. Will the outsourcing of this $12 billion project deliver a death blow to the American steel industry?

Alan Gunderson, 52, worked as a systems analyst and computer programmer in Tulsa, Okla. When he quit his job in July 2008, he had never been out of a job longer than a month. After two years out of work he landed a new job nine months ago, earning $15,000 less with no guaranteed benefits.

JD Galvin studied substance abuse counseling in college, and started his career in human services. He switched to IT in 2000 and was laid off two years ago.
He has yet to find a new job. He's now active in the 99ers movement, an effort to organize people who have exhausted all available unemployment benefits.

Wayne Drescher worked in automotive IT in Indiana. He was with his company for 23 years before being laid off from his position more than two years ago. Here is an edited excerpt of their conversation.

In 1990, the U.S. Department of Labor predicted there would be more well-paid jobs for programmers with four years of college. They were wrong. Employment fluctuated in the years following the report, then settled into a slow downward pattern after 2000.

Donald Barlett and James Steele are revisiting America: What Went Wrong, their landmark 1991 newspaper series, in a new project with the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Over the next year, the project team will examine how four decades of public policy has shaped America's ongoing economic crisis.

We feature charts, maps, photos and other visualizations that reflect the state of the economy as part of our What Went Wrong project. This column chart shows the growing disparity between what individuals and corporations pay in taxes. In the 1950s, the difference was 22 percent. Recent figures show the difference is 62 percent.

Florida, as a center of the housing boom, still struggles to recover from the Great Recession. Financial stresses and widespread foreclosures have placed families in precarious situations, resulting in a spike in child homelessness. Susannah Nesmith reports in the Broward Bulldog.

An advanced degree and experience in the tech sector should be a ticket to a job in today's economy. But older workers in the heart of the new economy, Silicon Valley, are finding their resume is not the issue. Aaron Glantz reports in The Bay Citizen.